Fantasy archive

2017

Video installation (five-channel with audio)

Variable dimensions / Loop

In a series of works done in 2017 and 2018 about Hovland, Dias & Riedweg revisit the work of the North American photographer, artist and activist Charles Hovland (1954). Between 1980 and 2000, Hovland published every week an ad at the New Yorker newspaper The Village Voice, announcing his services as a photographer to document people’s sexual fantasies. As a result, he silently built up a collection of 3.000 35mm black and white film rolls of anonymous people who hired his services and about 450.000 color slides, which revealed over 1.500 models for male nude magazines during two decades. 

In their approach to Hovland’s work, Dias & Riedweg have made one single channel video “Waiting for a Model” that portrays the photographer in his studio, as well as two video-installations “Fantasy Archive” and “Romance Archive” and a series of photographs so called “Kaleidoscopics”. This group of works, entitled “Camera Contact”, investigates issues related to the popularisation of the digital image in detriment of analog photography and thereby materialize the profound change in the representation of sexuality and gender issues that takes place then. 

In Fantasy Archive Hovland’s black and white contact sheets were recreated into digital video animations. Each analog contact sheet was resized and transported onto one same “contact-part” in a collective vertical “contact-video” with various models, showing the chemical process of the passage from negative to positive of each image in video timing.

The result is presented in five vertical video screens where the audio reveals the photographer's notes about his models read by himself. These notes catalog the date of the photo session, the sexual fantasy of each model and the value they paid for the execution of these shootings. This enables a new archival organisation where the identity and gender of each model are substituted by their sexual fantasy.